[HN Gopher] Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
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Bots are getting good at mimicking engagement
Author : simul007
Score : 336 points
Date : 2025-10-15 11:11 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (joindatacops.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (joindatacops.com)
| simul007 wrote:
| Hi HN. I run a marketing agency and fell down this rabbit hole
| after a client's analytics made no sense (50k visitors, 47
| sales). I ended up building a simple script to track user
| behavior and analyzed 200+ small e-commerce sites. The average
| was 73% bot traffic that standard analytics counts as real.
|
| The bots are getting creepily good at mimicking engagement. I
| wrote up my findings, including some of the bizarre patterns I
| saw and the off-the-record conversations I had with ad tech
| insiders. It seems like a massive, open secret that nobody wants
| to talk about because the whole system is propped up by it.
|
| I'm curious if other developers, founders, or marketers here have
| seen similar discrepancies in their own data.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| "All clicks are click fraud" isn't that far from the truth.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I've never intentionally clicked on an ad, ever. I've
| accidentally clicked a few, due to tricks or fat fingers.
| jpadkins wrote:
| Did you read the article? If so, you clicked on an ad. This
| blog post was an ad for datacops.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| And if you've ever scrolled social media or used the
| internet at all, you've read and clicked ads.
|
| Only considering old school "Ads by google" banners as
| ads and then patting yourself on the back for never
| clicking them is pretty faint praise for your ad evasion
| skills.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| No, of course I've read longer form posts and then
| realized they were just there for product placement, or
| affilate links, etc.
|
| I don't click display ads or links to Amazon or YouTube
| listings, etc. If I want to buy something I try to go
| directly to the manufacture's site and search for it
| there. If I have to go to a third party sales platform
| I'll go there and search for the thing I want.
|
| I rarely click on YouTube recommedations, because they
| are more and more just AI slop. I subscribe to people
| whose content is interesting, and that's the vast
| majority of what I watch.
| speedgoose wrote:
| You never watched a YouTube video that was some kind of
| teleshopping show ?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Ah... I remember back when Anandtech would run a monthly
| roundup of hard drives that would usually insist that you
| pay another $150-$200 for a hard drive because
| hypothetically the more esoteric consumer SKUs were 3db
| softer or consumed 0.2W less than the mass-produced least-
| cost enterprise Seagates. [1] They unquestioningly quoted
| the spec sheets and never did any tests whereas everyone
| knows you can't trust spec sheets when it comes to noise
| and power.
|
| The thing was that site kept reflowing the layout over and
| over again and I think the point was that they were hoping
| you were going to click on something you saw on the sidebar
| and then it would reflow and an ad would be there right at
| the second when you clicked and then... Ka-Ching!
|
| [1] Funny reversal that the enterprise product is mass
| market and the consumer product is overpriced if not gold-
| plated.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Yeah. Even in the extremely rare circumstance where if I
| actually want to see more about the product I specifically
| search it instead of clicking on it because everyone knows
| clicking on the ad is how you get infected, spied, on or
| scammed. And I think they already discarded 'views' long ago
| as too useless ironically.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| This is so common, I find it strange to see a whole article
| framing it as a shocking phenomenon. Like, have you heard of
| PostHog?
| urbandw311er wrote:
| What do you mean re Posthog?
| rightbyte wrote:
| What do you think is the false negative ratio of the remaining
| 27%? A 0.1% total conversion rate would imply 1/270 visitors
| buying stuff and I am quite certain I buy stuff in maybe every
| 10th online store I visit or something.
| criddell wrote:
| Does it really matter if it's all fraud? You track 47 sales
| over some period. What was the ad spend for that period?
| Combine that with previous data and that should be enough to
| figure out if it was a successful campaign or not.
|
| When a company puts up a billboard or an ad on the bus, they
| don't care if the ad is seen by dashcams and dogs. All that
| matters is impact on the bottom line.
| nemomarx wrote:
| If you could pay for web ads in the same way you could pay
| for a billboard (flat rate per period of time) yeah that
| would help. if you pay per impression or view or click you
| have some other issues
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I love when I see websites that do this. They are just rare
| enough, but I appreciate them for existing.
| processing wrote:
| yes, the co is likely spending big money on retargeting to
| bring back a potential customer to sell what the bot clicked
| on to generate retargeting. it's fraud and costing the
| company money.
| boplicity wrote:
| It makes optimizing your ads significantly harder. Imagine
| trying to understand traffic flow on a freeway when 99.9% of
| cars are just projected illusions. Not fun.
|
| Effective advertising depends on iterative testing, which is
| very hard if the signal to noise ratio is way off.
| paulcole wrote:
| > Does it really matter if it's all fraud
|
| Uh, yes.
|
| If you get 47 sales on $10k in ad spend (pay per click) and
| $9900 of that $10k was fraudulent then you got 47 sales on
| $100 of ad spend. Imagine if you could stop those fraudulent
| clicks.
| dangus wrote:
| The point is, if $10k brings in 47 sales and that's not
| enough then you stop buying those ads. It doesn't really
| matter why it's not working. You take your marketing spend
| elsewhere.
|
| You can't stop fraudulent clicks just like you can't stop
| your SuperBowl ad from playing while your viewers are in
| the bathroom. How much of ESPN's viewership happens at bars
| where nobody is watching?
|
| At some point it's not reasonable to expect ad networks to
| be able to stop sophisticated bots or exclude them from
| your billed impressions.
|
| They should definitely try to minimize it if they want to
| maintain the value of their impressions but I think there
| is a good argument that OP just isn't the right customer
| for this type of advertisement.
|
| If you're trying to sell a t-shirt you don't hire a
| salesperson to cold call people, maybe OP shouldn't be
| using web ads in the first place. If fraud was cut down by
| half would their situation really be that much better?
| ccortes wrote:
| > It doesn't really matter why it's not working.
|
| It does, because it changes the strategy.
|
| If you think the ads are working and have 10k potential
| customers then you start thinking about how to increase
| your conversion rate thinking you could get a chunk of
| those 10k, you might think distribution is solved.
|
| But if it turns out only 2.5k are real humans then your
| conversion rate might not even be an issue and it's just
| the marketing strategy that needs tweaking.
|
| The whole point is that they are giving you fraudulent
| traffic which you use as real data to figure out the next
| steps. If you don't know it's fraudulent or how much of
| the clicks are fraudulent then you are taking decisions
| under the wrong assumptions.
|
| > You can't stop fraudulent clicks just like you can't
| stop your SuperBowl ad from playing while your viewers
| are in the bathroom
|
| That's not even a good analogy, we are taking clicks, not
| impressions.
| paulcole wrote:
| > You can't stop fraudulent clicks just like you can't
| stop your SuperBowl ad from playing while your viewers
| are in the bathroom
|
| Yes, you literally can stop fraudulent clicks. I'm not
| sure where you get the idea that it's not possible?
|
| This is nothing like the Super Bowl analogy.
| whistle650 wrote:
| And imagine how much more you'd have to pay for each of
| those clicks if everyone could stop those fraudulent
| clicks. In equilibrium it shouldn't change the total ad
| spend.
| arichard123 wrote:
| But if you're the only one doing it because the
| competition haven't figured it out, then you win in until
| they do. You can outbid on each ad.
| whistle650 wrote:
| That's true. But you probably can't. At least any more
| than others. It's a systemic issue in the ad network
| ecosystem which you don't have much control over. If you
| can figure it out, odds are lots of others can too.
| People do assess the quality of traffic sources and do
| check the return on ad spend. It's that system wide
| process that keeps the return on ad spend roughly
| constant.
|
| The point here, for me, is that a microeconomic
| perspective on this whole question is more salient than a
| purely technical one.
| ccortes wrote:
| That's the point, without the fraudulent clicks you would
| just move on to some other strategy because the pricing
| would not be worth it.
|
| Fake clicks give the illusion that ads are working and
| instead you have to optimize your funnel or whatever
| else.
| rockskon wrote:
| A properly informed market is a more efficient market.
|
| The online ad market is extremely inefficient because it
| has no idea how much ad spend is even reaching people.
| bluGill wrote:
| You should have a good idea. How to know if an ad reaches
| people had been extensively studied for a lot longer than
| the internet even existed. Newspapers don't have clicks,
| but you still need to know if you ad works. Even on the
| internet, a large part of the value of ads are see the
| ad, buy latter without clicking on the ad. We can track
| this: do it.
| paulcole wrote:
| The ad spend itself is not the issue.
|
| I am fine with spending $10,000 on ads (or whatever
| amount).
|
| The issue is that when I know $5,000 of it was spent on
| clicks that had 0% chance to convert. For every
| fraudulent click I can block/prevent that is one more
| click that can be made by a real person who may actually
| make a purchase.
| kingstnap wrote:
| You can't just "ignore" fraudulent clicks as though those
| aren't baked into the original price. The only thing you
| should care about is your own sales vs your own ad spend.
|
| Your calculations make as much sense as pouring out 90% of
| a can of beer, claiming you have just made vodka, and
| simultaneously trying to pay only for the 10% of beer that
| is left.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Why are fraudulent clicks my problem? Why should I pay
| for them?
| garciasn wrote:
| In my extensive experience, you take irrefutable evidence
| back to the ad platforms and they provide 'make goods'
| after the fact for those fraudulent visitors.
|
| The entire premise of the article is quite accurate and
| most companies are spending money on third-parties to do
| what this guy has done to recoup fraudulent spends; so,
| none of this is new to the industry. Everyone knows it's
| happening and it's all part of the gig; it benefits
| everyone except those spending so little is truly done to
| correct it.
| bluGill wrote:
| They are not your problem. You paid $10k for 47 sales
| (that is the original example numbers) - is this a good
| value is the question you need to ask. If this is not
| good value then you don't advertise there at all, if it
| is you pay the price.
|
| It is the ad network's problem because they are showing
| ads to all those bots which costs them. It is also the ad
| networks problem in that they are not effective - maybe
| for your $10k for 47 sales is good enough, but for most
| it isn't and so they lose customers who pay attention to
| value. It is also their problem in that by giving a false
| number of views they lose some face, but this is always a
| proxy that isn't of much value to anyone.
|
| The more important thing that is your problem is
| verifying the ads are worth it. How do you know the ad
| resulted in 47 sales. A large number of adds should be
| buy this in the future not today, and thus clicks are the
| wrong measure.
| paulcole wrote:
| > The only thing you should care about is your own sales
| vs your own ad spend.
|
| You do understand that when I stop/reduce the fraudulent
| clicks that leaves extra ad budget available to be spent
| by clicks from real people who will actually buy things.
|
| I have 0 incentive to not work to stop/reduce the
| fraudulent clicks. My ad spend stays the same but my
| sales go up.
| dangus wrote:
| I was about to say something similar to this.
|
| You aren't paying for conversion rate, you are paying for a
| link being put on a website when a query is made. You can't
| control whether a bot follows that link. You can't control
| how sophisticated that bot is. You can't expect an advertiser
| to filter out every type of illegitimate traffic (although it
| sounds like they probably have the capability to filter out
| more but don't have any incentive to do so).
|
| I have seen recommendations from across the Internet to not
| bother with Google ads and other similar paid ad services.
| It's basically like paying for a cold lead, you're attracting
| one of the least interested types of customers.
|
| The recommendation I've always seen is that it's better to
| build legitimate interest in your product by producing
| content. Or perhaps move to an advertising platform where
| there's more of a guarantee of reaching human users.
|
| But still, I've heard that trying to spend customer
| acquisition dollars on one-time purchases is a losing battle.
|
| If Tesla was able to start a massive car company without
| buying ads you can go without AdWords, too.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| >I have seen recommendations from across the Internet to
| not bother with Google ads and other similar paid ad
| services. It's basically like paying for a cold lead,
| you're attracting one of the least interested types of
| customers.
|
| Google Ads used to be very effective. You are catching the
| punter as they are actually looking for a solution to their
| problem. However Google have inflated bids and increased
| the complexity to the point where very few people can make
| a decent return now.
|
| >The recommendation I've always seen is that it's better to
| build legitimate interest in your product by producing
| content.
|
| That is becoming rapidly less true as AIs steal all the
| traffic.
|
| >If Tesla was able to start a massive car company without
| buying ads you can go without AdWords, too.
|
| We can't all be Teslas.
| whistle650 wrote:
| This is the key point. Ads and clicks etc are priced in a
| competitive market. If they don't deliver the ROI because of
| bots, then people (including the allegedly hopelessly
| confused e-commerce retailers) would pay less for the same
| amount of traffic. It may be annoying (and the cost of
| dealing with that annoyance would further drive down the
| price paid for the traffic). But what matters is that an
| e-commerce site is profitable (enough) after the ad spend,
| period. If they are not, why do they spend what they spend on
| the ads?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Google is a competitive ad market?
| toast0 wrote:
| There are certainly competition concerns about Google's
| advertising programs.
|
| But within their advertising market, you compete for
| placement with other advertisers. If everyone is getting
| lots of fraud traffic, presumably they adjust their bids
| for it, if you're getting outbid consistently, it's
| reasonable to expect that the other advertisers are
| either getting a better ROI or they have a lower ROI
| target than you do.
|
| About a million years ago, I was on a team that had a
| significant ad program, and it was primarily data driven,
| we'd come up with keywords to advertise on, measure the
| results and adjust our bids. With a little bit of manual
| work to filter out inappropriate keywords or to allow a
| lower ROI on "important" keywords. Of course, our revenue
| was largely also from advertising, so it was a bit
| circular.
| bluGill wrote:
| At google I would expect no. However I don't understand
| why other "portals" are not running their own ads (some
| are of course - but I think more should). If you are a
| portal your value is the eyeballs you sell to
| advertisers, so why are you out soucing this critical
| part of your business value? This needs to be a core
| competency you keep in house.
| zurfer wrote:
| Yes it matters because Google ad spend is just one way to
| market and it's harder to attribute sales if there is a lot
| of fraud making it more inefficient.
| fukka42 wrote:
| Of course. It means you're being scammed by your advertising
| partner (Google).
| ceedan wrote:
| yes, it matters.
| bad_haircut72 wrote:
| When you talk to Google sales they want to know how much you
| make per customer, so theyre able to figure out exactly how
| much they could charge to take 80% of the margin. The cream
| on top is taken by Google in the form of fake bot clicks.
| bluGill wrote:
| IF you have things right - which Google has incentive to
| see to it that you don't - this makes no difference.
| Because the real measure isn't how much you make per
| customer, (including those who come by other means) - it
| people who didn't click on the ad even though seeing it was
| a part of their decision to buy (they saw the ad on their
| phone and told their wife who bought it). If you are doing
| proper add effectiveness measurement you get this data (it
| is messy data).
|
| Remember what matters is how the ad affects the bottom
| line. Everything else is just a proxy - you need to check
| to see if your proxies are good enough.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Because the digital ads environment has promised more data.
| That is slowly falling apart, but it has been expected for a
| decade or so now.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Sounds like the bots might eventually restore privacy by
| accident by making the additional data all dross, leaving
| only sales correlative modeling.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Yes, that is more or less what is happening now, but also
| driven by AI. All marketing is moving back "up the
| funnel."
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > they don't care if the ad is seen by dashcams and dogs
|
| they also don't get charged retroactively for each dashcam
| and dog that looks at the billboard
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You may be able to cancel out the numbers if the rate of
| fraud to real clicks is stable.
|
| But it's incredibly unlikely that the amount of fraud is
| stable, any attention from a small player can generate enough
| volume to eclipse all of the background. Thus no, you can't
| just account for it on your calculation.
|
| When a company puts up a billboard, it doesn't get taken down
| because a flock of birds passed by before anyone could look
| at it.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It depends on whether the ad engagement / views were real
| people or bots - if you're a competitor, then using bots to
| use up your competitor's ad budget is a strategy.
|
| If you display ads on your website, then sure, it doesn't
| matter if a bot or real person viewed/clicked on your ad if
| you get paid regardless - to the point where there's a big
| industry of putting ads on sites then having bots engage with
| the site and its ads.
|
| Billboards are a bit different because that's paid per week /
| month, but internet ads are paid per impression or click.
| rockskon wrote:
| If it's on your website then they'd be taking up bandwidth
| you gotta pay for.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > When a company puts up a billboard or an ad on the bus,
| they don't care if the ad is seen by dashcams and dogs.
|
| Billboards sell for flat rates, online advertising is sold on
| the basis of impressions.
| criddell wrote:
| Billboard rates are based on impressions too. A billboard
| along a busy road is more expensive than one out in the
| sticks.
| lurk2 wrote:
| The pricing of a billboard is based on projected
| impressions but is decoupled from the billboard's actual
| impressions. You pay the flat rate based on projected
| impressions. It doesn't subsequently matter if an army of
| robots passes through and views the billboard 10,000
| times, because the original projected audience should
| still see the billboard. You're getting what you paid
| for. It's also possible the projections are erroneous,
| fraudulent, or that the actual impressions just don't
| follow the projected impressions for some other reason.
| This is the advantage of advertising online--if you pay
| for 10,000 views, the ad runs until you get them.
|
| Contrast the billboard with an online ad: If you pay for
| 10,000 impressions, and 9,000 of those impressions end up
| being automated traffic, then you've effectively lost 90%
| of your advertising budget. Like you mentioned, ad buyers
| can and do account for this, so it's not clear that it's
| as big of a problem as this thread is making it out to
| be. The theory I see thrown around is that Meta and
| Alphabet are tacitly allowing this bot traffic to
| continue (or even that they are responsible for it
| themselves) because it allows them to sell another round
| of ads, but if this is what is going on it isn't clear
| why firms would keep buying ads that aren't converting.
| seviu wrote:
| I once worked for the yellow pages in Switzerland. Our paid
| clients had a dashboard which reported how many users visited
| their business entry.
|
| We at engineering decided to filter out bots. Figures fell
| dramatically by more than 50%.
|
| In less that a day business mandated us to remove the filter.
|
| Bots are real people after all
| PedroBatista wrote:
| He idea of "reality" and how things work, even if the idea is
| "they work bad", is more important than any other argument or
| reality. That's true at personal level and even truer at any
| organizational level.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Well yes but seems business has decided truth is worth less
| than money. Or now that i think of it, everything is worth
| less than money. Even, money is the only thing worth
| anything. They don't care about people, pride, products, or
| truth.
| nostrademons wrote:
| I think the way it goes is more "What is true? It's that
| if I bury this truth, I will have more money."
|
| Interestingly, I think money is increasingly its own
| falsehood now. A lot of rich people are finding that they
| pay a lot to get what's basically a scam, like Sam
| Altman's swimming pool that leaked and ruined the rest of
| the house [1]. There's a reason that Billionaire's Bunker
| [2] is entering the cultural zeitgeist despite fairly
| terrible plotting, dialogue, and acting.
|
| [1] https://fortune.com/2024/07/17/sam-altman-infinity-
| pool-mans...
|
| [2] https://www.netflix.com/title/81606699
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| >> In less that a day business mandated us to remove the
| filter.
|
| Did something similar at a small company I was working at.
| The VP of marketing sat me down and told me to do the same
| thing.
|
| After the meeting, I was told by another dev that the VP was
| tying a monetary value to specific clicks and if I was
| filtering out the bots, it would make his data look bad and
| reduce the amount of potential revenue for the company he was
| touting.
|
| I think you can see how the bots were actually helping him
| promote how awesome a job he was doing with our web
| properties to the owners.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Could you have... maybe _eased it in over time_? So for
| example, every 4 days, filter out an additional 1% of the
| traffic detected as fake.
| crdrost wrote:
| That is worse. Now you have a bunch of companies wondering
| why their engagement is falling over a whole year, some
| dude's getting fired for not doing his job, etc. etc.
|
| The correct thing to do, probably, is to just provide the
| new data to the customer without changing what they were
| already looking at. So a new widget appears on their
| dashboard, "52% bot traffic", they click on that, and they
| see their familiar line chart of "impressions over time"
| broken down as a stacked line chart, bottom is "human
| impressions over time," top is "bot impressions over time,"
| and the percentage that they were looking at is reported
| either above or beneath the graph for the same time
| intervals. Thus calling attention to the bottom graph,
| "human impressions over time," and they can ask your sales
| people "how do I get THAT number on my normal dashboard?"
| and they can hem and haw about how you have to upgrade to
| the Extended Analytics Experience tier for us to display
| _that_ info and other business nonsense...
|
| Point is, you stimulate curiosity with loud interference
| rather than quietly interfering with the status quo.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Fair enough, although in that circumstance I think you'd
| have to mark the non-human traffic as "unverified
| traffic" to soften the blow
| Kye wrote:
| Makes me think of the recent thing where YouTube stopped
| counting views with ad blockers. The Linus Tech Tips people
| worked out they were still seeing the same ad impressions and
| revenue despite views dropping by half. Unfortunately,
| sponsorship deals are often sold on viewership and I'm not
| sure even LTT has the clout to convince them nothing is
| functionally different.
| Gigachad wrote:
| YouTube didn't stop counting views with ad blockers. It was
| one blocker extension that added the view counter api to
| the block list.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| That's splitting hairs, but in a way that's important to
| the conversation.
|
| If YouTube served gigabytes of the video file for 40
| munutes and human watched it for that time, but they
| didn't send a request to `youtube.com/api/stats/atr/` and
| periodically to `/stats/qoe?`, did the video actually get
| viewed?
|
| I think a reasonable person would say that the person
| viewed that video. Only a programmer would suggest that
| wasn't a view because they didn't properly engage the
| statistics and tracking endpoints.
|
| But so much of the industry is built on deeply invasive
| tracking and third-party ad networks that this is a
| normal thing.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Youtube might not really care about accurate view
| counting in that way. In fact, Youtube likely does not
| care at all about traffic that won't view an ad, and they
| have demonstrably been hostile to that traffic for a
| while. Someday youtube hopes that nobody with an
| adblocker ever views any video, and has no intention to
| track their view attempts.
|
| If that causes a problem with Youtubers making a paycheck
| from external sponsors, _Youtube really really does not
| care_ , because sponsorships are money that youtube
| doesn't get!
|
| Youtube is downright hostile to creators who don't make
| the "right" content, which means new videos at a perfect
| schedule that all have the exact same "taste" such that
| viewers can mindlessly consume them in between the actual
| ad breaks youtube cares about. The more and faster people
| accept this, the more likely we get improvements.
|
| It took over a year for youtube to agree to let people
| swear in videos without punishment, including videos that
| are set as "These are not intended for children", after
| they unilaterally introduced this swear downranking
| several years ago.
|
| Youtube cares about Mr Beast and that's about it. If you
| do not run your channel like Mr Beast, youtube hopes you
| die painfully and think about your mistake. Youtube
| actively drives creators making actual art, science,
| knowledge, and other types of videos to burnout, because
| Youtube considers creators to be a renewable resource
| worth exploiting, because there will always be 15 year
| olds who want to become influencers.
|
| It is not "deeply invasive tracking" or "programmer
| thinking", it's entirely business. Google's business is
| _ad views_ , not video views. They want to measure what
| they care about
| Gigachad wrote:
| I think most websites would break if a 3rd party script
| started blocking things. Theres also the fact that view
| tracking is fairly complex since they need to filter out
| bots / ad fraud.
|
| And just the fact that if users have a privacy extension
| blocking the view tracker, is it not just respecting
| their wishes to not be tracked?
| arccy wrote:
| if a bot (or whatever latest of download tool) was served
| gigabytes of video, does that mean a human eventually
| viewed it? no.
| mapt wrote:
| This is essentially fraud. Your company was made aware that
| it was selling a product with wildly different
| characteristics than advertised, and chose to cover it up.
|
| There are defensible business reasons for this, in having a
| contract already in place at the old CPM, so being unable to
| double the CPM and half the views mid-contract... but still
| pretty much fraud.
| ww520 wrote:
| Way back when I work in an ad based company, click fraud
| handling was under my overseeing. We caught about 20 percent
| of clicks as fraudulent and filtered them out before billing
| the ad placing vendors. It was a constant battle with the
| sales team to relax the rules, as any clicks filtered out cut
| into the sales revenue. Sometimes we got the customers on our
| side as they ran their own analysis on the billed click
| report and came back demanding refund as they found a bunch
| of fraudulent clicks.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Yeah, the incentives there are obviously misaligned. I
| wonder if there is a potential way of making advertising
| click through tracking following the "I cut the cake, you
| chose the slice" model.
|
| Some countries have property taxes where you declare the
| value and the government retains the right to purchase the
| property for that value for example.
|
| My first thought was to make the advertising cost driven by
| revenue on the site. But that just reverses the incentive.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > I ended up building a simple script to track user behavior
| and analyzed 200+ small e-commerce sites.
|
| Why not use Microsoft Clarity?
|
| > The bots are getting creepily good at mimicking engagement.
|
| You would think Google Analytics would help a lot with this,
| but they seem to not care.
| unbalancedevh wrote:
| > You would think Google Analytics would help a lot with
| this, but they seem to not care.
|
| Not just not care, but don't they have incentive to report
| higher traffic?
| pixl97 wrote:
| At this point Google is just committing fraud to justify
| high stock prices.
| hdseggbj wrote:
| That's like saying why not just live on the dole?
|
| Answer: pride, curiosity, inspiration, creativity, a sense of
| ownership, integrity, control, vision
|
| I can't believe these concepts are so foreign to so many.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Okay, well I'm asking the author why they developed their
| own analytics tool rather than using an industry standard
| hoping there's some reason beyond motivational phrases.
|
| Like, asking if there's a real technical reason.
|
| But, go off I guess.
| Theodores wrote:
| Yes, and a lot of the pain is self-inflicted.
|
| Too often I have been working on ecommerce gigs where the
| traffic comes from internal 'SEO' tools. Normally the person in
| charge is marketing, not technical, so it has always been
| difficult to get past identifying the problem to fixing it.
|
| Often ecommerce companies are very siloed, so one person in one
| part of the 'team' is scraping the site with their special
| tools, only for another person to be doing another scrape with
| their special tools. You can have the guy doing the newsletter
| doing his thing, the guy doing organic search doing their
| thing, the guy doing paid ads doing their thing and someone in
| sales doing their own thing.
|
| The sad thing is that they are typically just a few SQL joins
| away from exactly the data they want in a format they can
| digest. However, due to silo-ing, it can be hard to have that
| conversation.
|
| On top of that, you do get new bots that need to be dealt with.
| The Huawei bot will scrape everything yet the store might not
| be delivering to China. So there are legit bots not doing ad
| fraud that need to be dealt with.
|
| What I also find interesting is that nobody is interested in
| the server logs. They come for free, and, although not having
| CDN cache hits, they still record checkout transactions and any
| pages that don't have a freshly cached page.
|
| Ad fraud also goes on in companies. I worked for a very
| successful company once and we only measured sales and what was
| out of stock. We didn't need open rates for emails or click
| through rates, our main problem was selling too much, which was
| a nice problem to have. Note that if you sell too much then you
| aren't going to get it all out the door in a timely fashion, or
| you run out of big lorries to put the orders in.
|
| Since then I have not worked on a site that is as successful.
| Instead we have people getting praise for 'false metrics'.
| Anything an SEO person creates or a marketeer measures will
| always have some nonsense aspect to it. Or the accounting is
| mixed with brick and mortar sales even though free shipping and
| discounts have been given on each sale, with adwords used to
| get people through the 'door'.
|
| Since sales manager has to report to someone on the board, if
| the sales numbers aren't good, the nonsense stats can be used
| to obfuscate the facts. The board only ever care about profit,
| so I don't like the way this goes down with false metrics of
| nonsense.
|
| Another fundamental problem in ecommerce is a lack of basic
| salesmanship. If you work the shop floor doing specialist sales
| where you have to listen to the customer's needs, then you gain
| experience in the art of sales. You haven't got to be good at
| it, in fact it can be better to know your limitations, for me
| that is big ticket items where I don't have the product
| knowledge, however, I could always hand those sales over to a
| much more capable colleague.
|
| You don't win every sale, but, in retail, you can have some
| really good streaks where no customer leaves empty handed. Your
| conversion rate is going to be more like 90% in face to face
| sales if you have the right product at the right price, with
| customers that don't buy coming back the following day or week
| to splash the cash.
|
| In High Street retail there is no way you give customers 15%+
| off just for stepping through the door. Yet this is table
| stakes in ecommerce, particularly for small to medium size
| shops. This instantly devalues the product.
|
| Often there will be chatbots for whatever reason, and I am sure
| the likes of Dell can get that right, but your typical small
| ecommerce site will fluff this up too, so any customer daring
| to use the chatbot will not get instant help from a sales
| person.
|
| So what to do?
|
| It depends on your product, however, the goal is to get
| customers for life, not to churn through them. To achieve this
| it comes down to product, price, availability, shipping times,
| customer service and incentives for the customer to advertise
| for you, with reviews, word of mouth and all that hard stuff
| that needs real human skill. Sometimes it will only be a one-
| off sale, for example, if someone is buying a mattress. But,
| even then, the customer service basics matter.
|
| What is also silly is how, with everything you buy, you will
| get adverts and incentives to buy what you have just purchased.
| I don't know why this is not considered career limiting, but
| nobody seems to have fixed this.
|
| Next time, I will find out what data everyone needs and have my
| own script to collect just that data, then have a live backup
| that can be used for all internal purposes such as report
| generation. There will be no mystery script containers
| downloading 150 scripts with cookies, outside of developer
| supervision. My hunch is that the only numbers that really
| matter are sales.
|
| As for why the sales aren't happening, so long as functionality
| is as it should be on all devices, then you have to dig deeper,
| to the knowledge level that only someone that has worked the
| showroom floor understands. Really, a website should be the
| sales person's knowledge condensed into HTML. Yet nobody asks
| the guy serving customers what they upsell or what product they
| recommend if a customer baulks at a given product. Instead we
| have mystery-meat AI scripts that manage these things.
|
| Thanks for the heads up on ad fraud, normally I am a long way
| from that due to internal scraping efforts being far more
| damaging to website performance, and, as a developer, page load
| times matter to me far more than how much was paid for the
| traffic.
| cantrevealname wrote:
| > _" Everyone knows. But if we filtered it all out properly,
| our revenue would drop 40% overnight, and investors would have
| a meltdown."_
|
| The word "revenue" above doesn't sound right. Did you mean "ad
| impressions", "clicks", "visits", or something else?
|
| If the bot traffic is giving you 40% more _revenue_ , well
| that's excellent news, right? If it's _revenue_ , then keep
| doing it.
| Sander_Marechal wrote:
| It's revenue for the ad platforms, not for the clients
| KaiserPro wrote:
| But what I'm struggling to understand is where is the money
| coming from to run those bots?
|
| How does the advertising money get to them to make it worth
| their while to run bots at such a scale?
|
| I mean sure, I suspect that people in the advertisers are doing
| it, but surely thats massively risky. there must be a grey
| market for this kind of transaction?
| burnte wrote:
| > But what I'm struggling to understand is where is the money
| coming from to run those bots?
|
| I agree, I have a hard time understanding the motivation for
| this behavior. It's obviously happening, I just don't know
| how someone benefits from a bot pretending to browse the
| internet.
| bombcar wrote:
| Isn't the idea that you run google ads on your site, and
| then have your botnet click the ads on your site, and you
| get paid for the traffic?
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Aha! that makes much more sense. Yeah having something
| autobot your click throughs seems like a motivation to
| run bots.
|
| I was thinking about ad traffic from one of the
| meta/twitter/tiktok products and couldn't think what the
| motivation would be
| randunel wrote:
| Scrape data and package+sell it, either on demand or pre
| scraped.
| logsr wrote:
| for ad networks and social media platforms that provide
| monetization the click fraud is direct.
|
| there is also a massive industry of fake accounts and fake
| engagement for social media and SEO (google). bots are
| designed to create plausibly real engagement, which is used
| to trick ranking algorithms into boosting content. these bots
| have to be real enough to bypass platform detection. clicking
| through on ads is a way of incentivizing platforms not to
| shut them down and possibly improving the ranking results,
| working with the theory that platforms give stronger weight
| to engagement signals from clients that generate more
| revenue.
| larrymcp wrote:
| > _I had one client spending $12,000 per month on Google Ads_
|
| In Google Ads you can just turn off the option to run your ads
| on non-Google sites; I think it's called their Display Network.
| Just run your campaign only on Google's search pages.
|
| I'm surprised the article doesn't mention this rather common
| solution.
| dang wrote:
| > The bots are getting creepily good at mimicking engagement
|
| I've nicked that sentence to use as the title above, since it's
| more neutral and representative of what the article is about.
| dpoloncsak wrote:
| I work in e-commerce and completely believe this could be true.
| The 'Cart Abandonment Bot' is actually something we just had a
| meeting on today, trying to figure out what's going on here.
|
| With that said, what do you think the error is here? Could your
| script have had some false positives? Enough to move the dial?
| bombcar wrote:
| Some sites won't give you the price or the shipping until you
| add to cart, but that shouldn't map to an automatic removal
| of item from cart (unless there IS a timer somewhere set to 4
| minutes on the server side).
|
| Strange that the item cost $47 and the number of sales was
| 47.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > It seems like a massive, open secret that nobody wants to
| talk about because the whole system is propped up by it.
|
| I was never really a punk-rebel kid, but a certain part of me
| rooted in the optimism of the early-internet kinda wants to see
| ad-models crash and burn.
|
| Even advertising "working normally" always had a psychic odor
| of exploitation and deceit. Ex: "You absolutely need this
| product or else your peers will hate you."
| cortesoft wrote:
| I find it really interesting when you describe "good bot"
| traffic.
|
| > During my investigation, a source from the e-commerce data
| industry provided a crucial piece of the puzzle. He explained
| that his former company was responsible for scraping 70 million
| retailer web pages every single day. This is a legitimate and
| massive source of automated traffic.
|
| > Why do they do this? For vital business intelligence. Major
| retailers like Amazon do not always notify vendors when they
| run out of stock. So, brands pay for data scraping services to
| monitor their own products. These "good bots" check inventory
| levels, see who is winning the "buy box," ensure product
| descriptions are correct, and track search result rankings.
| They even scrape from different locations and mobile device
| profiles to analyze what banner ads are being shown to
| different audiences.
|
| I think a lot of the players involved in this would say those
| are bad bots. Having your competitors scrape your site for data
| would probably be something most website owners wouldn't like,
| but getting data about THEIR competitors would be something
| they WOULD like.
|
| All bot traffic is good from SOMEONE'S perspective, otherwise
| it wouldn't be happening. Someone had to program the bot,
| someone has to be running it. They obviously think they are
| good bots.
|
| The people running AI scraping bots think they are good bots.
| Many content creators think those are bad bots. Price
| comparison sites scraping retailers think their bots are good.
| The sites being scraped often think they are bad bots.
|
| I just don't think we can clearly separate good and bad bot
| traffic without specifying whose perspective we are talking
| about.
| harshreality wrote:
| "Good bots" would be ones that fuel a healthy, competitive
| economy. Whether or not they're good from the perspective of
| a retailer, data about products and supply chains is
| important.
|
| "Bad bots" would be ones that primarily support grift. They
| siphon money from advertisers, or get other people to waste
| advertising $, or game product listing metrics so that the
| bots' owners products get better placement, or so that other
| manufacturers' products get worse placement. They're not
| creating any new value; they're _removing_ value from the
| economy by causing bad allocation of resources.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I can see many bots falling into the two categories you
| describe, but I can also see many other bots that would not
| fit easily, and whose value is debatable.
|
| For example, bots that scrape content for AI training; is
| that good or bad for a healthy economy? AI can be
| productive, but is it 'stealing' other's productivity,
| which could hurt in the long term if it causes decrease in
| future human production because of diminished rewards?
| j-bos wrote:
| > brands pay for data scraping services to monitor their own
| products.
|
| This case seems "good" by most perspectives.
| aorloff wrote:
| We are now at the point where plausibly some bots could be at
| the behest of an AI agent controlled by a human.
|
| This is not likely to distort the basic numbers in your story,
| but it makes the premise questionable
|
| If your script can correctly segregate bot traffic from human
| traffic, and website operators can conclude that bot traffic
| does not make purchases, then what -- you still don't want to
| blackhole that traffic right ?
| username223 wrote:
| > developers, founders, or marketers
|
| I'm none of those things, 10x or otherwise, and would be
| ashamed if I were. I do run a personal website, though, and
| most of the traffic is bots that ignore robots.txt. I wish
| those developers, founders, and marketers would stop doing that
| to me.
| oconaros wrote:
| I do web analytics consulting. One of my first projects at a
| digital marketing agency in 2021 was investigating weird
| traffic patterns for a global logistics firm. The findings are
| summarized in this blog post[1].
|
| Bot traffic has been an issue for years. It has given rise to a
| new cottage industry of ad fraud detection services, none of
| which I've found particularly valuable. It always comes down to
| "so what do we do about it?" and no one seems to know how to
| get bots to stop viewing or clicking on paid media placements.
| Consumers use Google search and are on FB, IG, TikTok,
| LinkedIn, etc., and there aren't really competing ad networks
| with "fewer bots". So they keep buying fake traffic knowing
| that a significant chunk of it is invalid.
|
| I don't see anything changing unless big tech companies making
| billions in ad revenue have a large enough incentive to do so.
| At the moment they have plenty of incentives to keep things as
| they are.
|
| "Half of the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the
| trouble is I don't know which half." - John Wanamaker
|
| [1] https://jimalytics.com/industry/youre-buying-bots-an-
| inconve...
| joomla199 wrote:
| Given that Wanamaker died in 1922 it's safe to say his quote
| was in the context of a different problem entirely (which
| still exists, on top of the bot issue).
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I'd suggest legislation. It's like when hotels or rental car
| companies tack on additional fees and consumers hate it but
| don't have much incentive to cooperate to change it.
| Consumers don't unionize much, but maybe we should?
|
| But maybe not legislation, because it might upset a ton of
| people. Any time a social media site goes through and seems
| to get rid of bots, people complain about how many
| "followers" they've lost. The fake user/clicker situation is
| quite pervasive, and a lot of parties, not just the
| advertising networks, benefit from the inflated numbers.
|
| But it can be so insidious..."wow, that video got 1M YouTube
| views? Must be very popular!" Orrrr a lot of those views were
| from bots? Who knows?
|
| So maybe a better approach than legislation is to talk about
| how the ad/bot fraud can both help us and hurt us and not
| demonize one side but see how we all may be implicated in it
| somehow. Maybe that will help us to be more aware of the
| problem and not fight against people, but try to work
| together to solve it.
| bodantogat wrote:
| Not really surprised. I spend a ridiculous amount on time banning
| bots every week.
| cantor_S_drug wrote:
| doesn't cloudflare have block bot traffic out of the box?
| mwexler wrote:
| It blocks the most egregious and give a bot score that you
| can use to get more aggressive at the next layer. That score
| seems to miss a lot of bad traffic, making it not very useful
| in it's current state.
| corford wrote:
| They do but it's largely useless against all but the most
| unsophisticated of bots.
| bodantogat wrote:
| Some of the bots I see use residential proxies, rotate IP
| address, countries, as well as fire-up a real browser.
| curiousObject wrote:
| Is there any incentive for a company to remove fake traffic[0]
| from its stats and analytics?
|
| I guess there is no incentive in most markets. Facebook, etc make
| only a token effort to reject non-troublesome bot traffic.
|
| [0] bots and other automated traffic which cannot generate
| revenue or human ad views
| nemomarx wrote:
| In theory if you have a lot of fake traffic then ads on your
| site will have an even worse conversion rate than normal?
| curiousObject wrote:
| _if you have a lot of fake traffic then ads on your site will
| have an even worse conversion rate than normal?_
|
| Yes, if you only count purchase/sale conversions
|
| Maybe no, if you also count clickthrough and view
| conversions, perhaps even lead conversions sometimes (because
| fake sign ups are possible).
|
| But you're right. Purchase conversions are one incentive
| kijin wrote:
| Next thing you know, the bots will learn how to purchase
| products, and we'll have come full circle.
|
| I'd love to have an agent that goes online whenever I'm
| running low on toilet paper or something, browses all the
| stores and clicks all the ads, and automatically orders the
| best deal it can find.
| technothrasher wrote:
| I certainly wouldn't want to be caught in that arms race
| where sites continually attempt to find sneaky ways to
| convince my agent to buy things I don't actually want.
| sanex wrote:
| By clicking on all the ads you're raising prices in the
| long run and just funneling money to google and meta,
| forcing the toilet paper companies to make scratchier tp
| to try and squeeze out more margin. My bhole would thank
| you for not doing this.
| kijin wrote:
| Or maybe if everyone does it, market forces will suppress
| the cost per click and we'll be back to square zero.
| sanex wrote:
| That's interesting. Drive ad value to zero or force them
| to start blocking crappy traffic. I think the issue is
| this could take us down the device attestation drm for
| the web path to discern legitimate traffic which is bad
| for the open web.
| blakesterz wrote:
| I guess the answer is no, and there's a couple quotes in there
| near the end: One rep I had known for years
| finally admitted the truth off the record. "Dude, we know," he
| said. "Everyone knows. But if we filtered it all out properly,
| our revenue would drop 40% overnight, and investors would have
| a meltdown."
| Galanwe wrote:
| For any real audit of website traffic (M&A, large advertising
| deals, etc), you typically don't rely on self reported
| statistics, but rather 3rd parties (e.g. SimilarWeb). These have
| actual spywares on top of Google analytics plug-ins to correlate
| real traffic from noise
| Propelloni wrote:
| I find the article's topic interesting, but the writing style is
| just... no. It reads like a True Crime transcript or really bad
| marketing copy. Which makes a certain kind of sense, I guess.
| oasisbob wrote:
| It's AI-generated. Grates on me too.
|
| The irony of complaining about bot traffic with bot copy is too
| funny.
|
| > It was not a sophisticated piece of software, just a tool
| designed to observe how "users" actually interacted with the
| website. I was not just counting clicks; I was watching
| behavior
| sixthDot wrote:
| What is really mind blowing is that, if understood correctly,
| bots would be used to check the availability of a product, that
| sounds so a "hacky" method, like "seriously people are doing that
| in 2025".
| viraptor wrote:
| Yeah, their list of recommendations could use another point:
| expose the public data in a simple, structured way.
|
| I'm working right now on an inventory management system for a
| clinic which would really benefit from pulling the prices and
| availability from a very specialised online shop. I wish I
| could just get a large, fully cached status of all items in a
| json/CSV/whatever format. But they're extremely not interested,
| so I'm scraping the html from 50 separate categories instead.
| They'll get a few daily bot hits and neither of us will be
| happy about it.
|
| If people are scraping data that you're not selling, they're
| not going to stop - just make it trivially accessible instead
| in a way that doesn't waste resources and destroy metrics.
| nemomarx wrote:
| I wonder if LLM agents will know to go for apis and data or
| if they'll keep naively scraping in the future. A lot of
| traffic could come down to "find me x product online" chats
| eventually
| viraptor wrote:
| https://llmstxt.org/ is there for that purpose.
| bdcravens wrote:
| HTML is the only truly universal standard.
| Closi wrote:
| The counterpoint is 'Why hand your competitors data on a
| silver plate'?
|
| Sure you might be willing to build the bot to scrape it...
| but some other competitors won't go to this effort so it
| still means a bit of information asymmetry and stops some of
| your competitors poaching customers / employing various
| marketing tactics to exploit short term shortages or pricing
| charges etc.
| viraptor wrote:
| I really don't believe we're in a situation where a company
| can exploit product availability and pricing data, is
| pushing enough volume to make it worth it, can process that
| information effectively, yet cannot hire someone on Fiverr
| to write a scraper in a few hours.
|
| > 'Why hand your competitors data on a silver plate'?
|
| To lessen the issue from the article and free up server
| resources for actual customers.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| At that point, why not join forces with other clinics, remove
| the middleman and purchase directly from vendors?
| hamburgererror wrote:
| Can you share the script you made for this analysis?
| squeedles wrote:
| Why is this in the least surprising? It's just the natural
| successor to what everyone used to do with the trade magazines
| thirty years ago. Back then you filled in a profile questionnaire
| to get a free subscription, so every basement hacker turned into
| the manager of a 500-person division with control of a $1m
| capital budget. The magazine didn't want to check because it
| would damage the demographic numbers that they pitched to
| advertisers. The advertisers knew that there was some liar's
| poker being played but everyone just rolled with it.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| Interesting. You didn't give specifics on what anti-bot measures
| sites implemented, so I'll add:
|
| Bot prevention measures can be good, but the more hoops you make
| your users jump though (CAPTCHA etc), the more legitimate users
| will drop off. Those have significant impacts on conversion
| rates.
|
| I would think fixing this should involve the analytics and
| attribution side rather than adding friction to your e commerce
| flow.
|
| Especially as bot tech continues to get better and more
| indistinguishable from real traffic.
| bombcar wrote:
| There are two kinds of bots - one that the very act of them
| futzing with your site is degrading performance (think AI bot
| DDoS), and the other that is annoying but not harming you
| directly.
|
| The second is best "blocked" by doing nothing at all and
| instead silently dropping them from analytics.
| baobun wrote:
| Would like to see the script. From reading it's impossible to
| tell if the methodology is sound. Would legitimate users with
| adblockers or disabling JS get counted is false positives, for
| example?
|
| That said, 73% doesn't come as a surprise. If anything I expect
| it to be higher.
|
| I guess this quote sums up the situation
|
| > When I tried to bring this up with a few major ad platforms,
| the conversation always followed a predictable script. The sales
| reps were incredibly friendly until I mentioned click fraud or
| bot traffic. Then, the tone shifted instantly to corporate-speak:
| "Our AI detection is industry leading" and "We take ad fraud very
| seriously." It was a polite but firm wall, a clear signal to stop
| asking questions.
|
| > One rep I had known for years finally admitted the truth off
| the record. "Dude, we know," he said. "Everyone knows. But if we
| filtered it all out properly, our revenue would drop 40%
| overnight, and investors would have a meltdown."
| fukka42 wrote:
| > One rep I had known for years finally admitted the truth off
| the record. "Dude, we know," he said. "Everyone knows. But if
| we filtered it all out properly, our revenue would drop 40%
| overnight, and investors would have a meltdown."
|
| Lawsuit time?
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean how much money are you going to spend going after
| them? Multi billion dollar companies love to take decades to
| sue.
|
| If the SEC weren't weak maybe they could go after them for
| fraudulent numbers.
| omnicognate wrote:
| IANAL (or an ad industry expert) but wouldn't a successful
| class action on this be staggeringly vast?
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean it would rock the US economy as it would involve
| the largest companies.
| bobbiechen wrote:
| It's a problem even on the company side. If the people
| responsible for marketing are judged on vanity metrics, they'll
| assume a conversion problem is later in the funnel. And even
| for venture-backed startups, I feel there is an incentive to
| turn a blind eye to bot signups since it juices numbers for
| investors who aren't paying attention.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| I'm puzzled by this: I thought it was well-understood, at least
| in the industry, that traffic numbers were at least _mostly_
| nonsense, and that ad click metrics especially were _suuuper_
| shady, typically more than half fraud; yet OP, in the business of
| "accurate ad spend analytics", _only just discovered this!?_
|
| It just doesn't ring true. That aspect of the story isn't novel
| at all, and someone in that line of work should _surely_ have
| known all this, right?
|
| Now the section on categorising different bot patterns, _that's_
| more interesting, and I haven't seen so much said about it.
| nemomarx wrote:
| 50k to 47 conversions seems like a noticeable increase in
| fakeness to me at least. that's going from more than half fraud
| to essentially only fraud with a rounding error amount of real
| users
| lazide wrote:
| This is the 'gold' that agentic/generative AI really
| produces.
|
| For most consumers, it's entertainment, but for industrial
| use it's great for this kind of fraud. And very difficult to
| detect at scale, since the only cost effective tools for this
| kind of analysis are also ML/AI, and hence can be fooled more
| predictably/trained against.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > This is the 'gold' that agentic/generative AI really
| produces.
|
| And here's me thinking it was producing a tonne more data
| scraping.
| zdragnar wrote:
| The last startup I worked at invested a ton of money- much of
| their marketing team's time plus a good chunk of development
| time for a few months- trying to "fix the funnel" in terms of
| conversions from these so-called leads.
|
| They had plenty of other problems, including an unworkable
| business plan, but maybe they would have had more time to pivot
| before selling out for pennies if they'd not been chasing their
| tail so much.
| boringg wrote:
| This is well understood for well over a decade at this point --
| the blogpost is a marketing effort by datacops.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Then it is securities fraud. Advertisers' shareholder money
| is being wasted in a process that is "well understood" to be
| lies, funneling money to tech industry.
| miriam_catira wrote:
| Some of us knew it, but it's getting worse. And I've worked
| adjacent to or on marketing teams for the the last decade...
| and I can't explain why but my theory is they all trust the
| numbers implicitly, esp. the ad spend. Having to justify your
| department's continued existence via KPIs that need to
| exponentially increase year over year means bloated numbers are
| a good thing. They can just blame sales for never closing
| deals.
| jerf wrote:
| There's the old story about Charles Babbage and his not
| understanding how you can feed garbage to a computer and
| people will believe the output, but in a sense it goes deeper
| than that; put a number in front of someone and I think a
| good 75% of the population at least will simply believe it.
| Not only believe it, but if someone comes along 15 seconds
| later with a different number, they'll argue with the new
| guy, even though in a parallel universe where the second guy
| got there first they'd have argued equally vociferously with
| the first guy! When objectively they have no real basis for
| either number, or any other.
|
| I can also say that with every passing year I see that when
| the Bible talks about people who _love lies_ it 's a lot less
| metaphorical than I thought it was when I was younger. The
| stories in this very thread about managers demanding that the
| original, bot-inflated numbers be put back up on their
| internal metrics rather than have the correct and accurate
| one is just an example, and one particularly vivid and easy
| to see.
|
| Though there is also a business opportunity there... I am
| also reminded of one of my favorite Dilbert cartoons where
| the boss is viewing a defective spreadsheet that has a higher
| profit for the year the farther down he scrolls into it. Why
| not just multiply your click stats by e^(number of months
| since start / 20) or so? I mean, if the click counts don't
| have to match any particular reality, go for the gusto.
| ttoinou wrote:
| The religion of Science is being taught all over the world
| and the only thing people can remember from that teaching
| is that Numbers are good, are true, are the only thing we
| should take into account and are computed by kind smart
| rational workers.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's always important to remember: _lies_ , _damned lies_
| , and _statistics_.
|
| And what is advertising sold on but statistics, hmmm.
| dnpls wrote:
| OP is selling their own web analytics product, so take the
| article with a grain of salt.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| I have no idea who OP is, but as someone who worked in the ad
| measurement pipeline, it tracks.
|
| This is a thing that the R&D folks at my company had lots of
| evidence for, but since we wanted to partner with Meta and
| Google to be the measurement company of record for FB/Insta
| and YouTube CPG advertising, we weren't allowed to discuss.
| quentindanjou wrote:
| It's more a matter of "how much" personally, I knew it was not
| reliable but I thought it would be around 5-10% and recently
| more around 20%. I was far from thinking close to _75%_!!
| mustaphah wrote:
| > Yet OP, in the business of "accurate ad spend analytics",
| only just discovered this!?
|
| Looks like a very fresh business [1]; it only became worth
| writing about once they were ready to pitch their product.
|
| [1] https://whois.domaintools.com/joindatacops.com
| nurettin wrote:
| > scraping 70 million retailer web pages every single day. This
| is a legitimate and massive source of automated traffic.
|
| Why do they do this? For vital business intelligence. Major
| retailers like Amazon do not always notify vendors when they run
| out of stock. So, brands pay for data scraping services to
| monitor their own products. These "good bots" check inventory
| levels, see who is winning the "buy box," ensure product
| descriptions are correct, and track search result rankings. They
| even scrape from different locations and mobile device profiles
| to analyze what banner ads are being shown to different
| audiences.
|
| _---------------_
|
| Guilty as charged. You quickly learn to bypass bot detection
| measures and create a fully automated system to gather all this
| information just because amazon doesn't provide it in an
| accessible manner causing harm to businesses who need this intel
| and their own internet infra.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Why doesn't Amazon provide this information? They just can't be
| bothered, knowing that they are the biggest retail platform and
| sellers "have" to be there regardless of how bad the experience
| is for them?
| nurettin wrote:
| They have atrocious FBA fees. Then there's etsy, overstock,
| wayfair, shopify, but nothing gives you the rush of showing
| that buybox I guess. It's like an optimization game for them
| at this point.
| Dead_Lemon wrote:
| It makes the argument of the open internet being unable to
| function without advertising, quite hard to prop up. Especially
| when over 70% of traffic if just people gaming the system, to
| real users detriment.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's a huge argument for dumb advertisement that doesn't track
| people or clicks.
|
| You know, the kind that existed before Google created their
| thing.
| awongh wrote:
| I don't really believe the main thesis of this article- it reads
| like much of the fake cliff-hanger pseudo-insight endemic to
| marketing and business influencers.
|
| Mainly, it avoids the main point- 73% of your traffic is "faked"
| enough to look real.
|
| Who are the players in that scenario that stand to benefit from
| your traffic being fake?
|
| You pay for Google (search ads) and Facebook ads but the traffic
| is faked by them (unlikely)
|
| You pay other publishing networks (maybe adsense?) and the
| website owners profit from sending fake traffic (maybe true? if
| the article were really trying to make a case for this, just name
| them?)
|
| Or, you work inside a company and just want to make your
| department look good?
|
| I'm not sure I know what the point of this article is besides a
| click bait title.
|
| Just tell me exactly what the mechanism is for this fake traffic-
| don't hint at some kind of conspiracy.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It would take a lot more investigative journalism to track down
| the bot networks and figure out the why and who, which I agree
| is the more interesting information. It's not surprising that
| nobody seems to be willing to be quoted by name as a source.
| The whole industry seems fake and shady.
|
| Despite the "LinkedIn influencer" writing style of the article,
| the results don't seem that shocking or unexpected.
| brazukadev wrote:
| > You pay for Google (search ads) and Facebook ads but the
| traffic is faked by them (unlikely)
|
| Unlikely?
| shmeeed wrote:
| Highly unlikely, because they obviously would never engage in
| fraudulent activity! I mean, what would even be their
| incenti-
|
| Eh, you know what, let's just not think too much about it.
| brazukadev wrote:
| If they know it is a bot, it is fraudulent. They know it is
| a bot when it is time to pay from their Adsense arm. It is
| insane that the same click that isn't paid to the
| publishers still goes to google's pockets.
| awongh wrote:
| As I said above, I think it's likely they don't do that
| much about fake adsense clicks.
|
| Fraudulently creating traffic and charging you for it is a
| whole other level of scam, though.
| awongh wrote:
| The distinction is between Google looking the other way if
| AdSense publishers are making them money, and Google
| generating their own fake traffic on their own search intent
| inventory.
|
| I'd say it's unlikely they are generating fake clicks on
| search ads.
|
| Mainly because they just don't need to in order to make
| money. They can still just charge you for impressions on
| searches that aren't the most well matched. No need to create
| fake traffic like this blog post conspiracy says.
| f4uCL9dNSnQm wrote:
| It is the website owners that commit click fraud. It has been
| that way for the last 25 years. I mean the first thing I did as
| a kid was checking what will happen if I keep clicking on ad on
| my newly created homepage.
|
| > just name them Does Adsense even gives you information where
| exactly your ad is getting published?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I can see doing it just to verify that the ads being shown on
| my site are not leading to anything I don't want to be
| associated with, e.g. porn, shock/tabloid content, politics,
| etc.
| rubyfan wrote:
| Who is profiting from the ad fraud?
| rightbyte wrote:
| Site owners and ad market places?
| jt2190 wrote:
| > This is the hidden bot economy.
|
| I still have to hear a compelling argument about why I should use
| computers "by hand" and ignore these powerful tools. Price
| checking, comparison shopping, buy when released for sale... All
| of these things point me to using bots.
|
| This feels a lot less like "fraud" and a lot more like "the world
| has moved on". Maybe it's time to route traffic that looks like
| bots to a bot-optimized shopping experience.
| MASNeo wrote:
| So are you saying it needs a an agent.txt along the robots.txt?
| jt2190 wrote:
| I'm just the idea guy... I'll let the market decide on the
| exact implementation. ;-) (That's not a bad idea BTW.)
| dpoloncsak wrote:
| I don't think anyone was arguing against those? The post seems
| mostly focused on bots that are being used to facilitate ad-
| fraud or manipulate rankings on marketplace sites with 3rd
| party vendors. I guess to check a price, you would need to
| scrape the site, but repeatedly adding and abandoning items,
| abusing referral systems....
|
| That feels a lot more like 'fraud' than 'the world evolving'
| shiftingleft wrote:
| After we implemented advanced bot traffic detection and
| filtering, their reported traffic plummeted by 71%. [...]
| But then the sales report came in. Their actual sales went up by
| 34%. Their real conversion rate optimization (CRO) efforts
| had been working all along, but the results were buried under an
| avalanche of fake clicks. They were not bad at marketing; they
| were just spending thousands of dollars advertising to robots
| programmed never to buy anything. Their marketing ROI went from
| "terrible" to "excellent" overnight.
|
| I don't understand how detecting bot traffic would directly lead
| to less ad spend.
|
| Can you just tell e.g. Google Ads that you don't want to pay for
| certain clicks?
|
| Did they modify their targeting to try to avoid bots?
| nemomarx wrote:
| I assume it's the filtering - detect the user is a bot, don't
| even load the ads, etc?
| shiftingleft wrote:
| As I understand it they are placing ads on other sites and
| are paying for visits to their site.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| You didn't think through this did you
|
| How would you do that on Google or a third-party site?
| V__ wrote:
| I could imagine that blocking bot traffic, would improve their
| retargeting and make sure that the retargeting budget is spent
| on real people leading to an increase in conversion.
| shiftingleft wrote:
| What's the API here for Google Ads? How does their site
| report to Google Ads whether that was a good/bad user? Is
| this done through conversion tracking? If so, why would you
| track anything but a completed purchase in the first place?
| morkalork wrote:
| If you building look-alike or remarketing audiences, having any
| bot users in there could give the wrong signal to Facebook or
| other platforms.
|
| >Can you just tell e.g. Google Ads that you don't want to pay
| for certain clicks?
|
| No
| tagalog wrote:
| We ran into this problem when running ads for an iOS App only to
| iOS traffic. Somehow 80% of our iOS only targeted traffic
| clickthrough was Android... Went to UGC and never looked back.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| What's ugc?
| anticorporate wrote:
| ugc = user generated content
| MASNeo wrote:
| Would be great if more data were made available by OP to peer
| review some of this. That said, making money with failure starts
| looking like a business model - highly unethical. Why make
| customers succeed when you loose money doing so.
| emacdona wrote:
| I'm not sure... but... maybe in this one single instance, I'm
| rooting for the bots.
|
| I mean, it's burning ad dollars and causing advertisers to
| rethink their strategy. Who knows, maybe that will eventually
| lead to the realization that web pages that are 20% content and
| 80% ads are just luring bots and not customers.
|
| On the other hand, the money being burnt is going to Google,
| Meta, etc... and helping fund massive surveillance
| infrastructure. To be honest, I'd prefer it if it all just went
| to shareholders. Heh, maybe that'll be the sign that we've hit
| peak surveillance infrastructure: Google and Meta dividend
| payments go up :-)
|
| But I have trouble sympathizing with someone who writes this:
|
| > Mouse Movements: Did the cursor move in natural, human-like
| arcs, or did it snap between points?
|
| > Scrolling Patterns: Was the scrolling speed variable, with
| pauses and upward scrolls, or was it a perfectly smooth,
| mechanical glide?
|
| > Time Between Interactions: How long did a "user" wait between
| clicking a link, hovering over an image, or adding an item to the
| cart?
|
| I read that as: "We're tracking every movement, every
| hesitation... so that we can feed it to our models and determine
| how best to keep you addicted".
|
| I knew it was happening, and I know I'm editorializing there...
| but they are getting closer and closer to just coming out and
| saying it.
|
| edit: Added newlines in quoted part.
| vmaurin wrote:
| I did work in the ad tech industry for almost 15y and big corp
| like Google/FB scam their user:
|
| - they don't allow double tracking, so you have to trust their
| numbers
|
| - if you look at IP from their "clicks", you see often a
| FB/Google datacenter IP range
|
| - and for most of the traffic they might send you, they did just
| clever algorithm and heavy profiling to stole your organic
| traffic. So they get this "amazing" performance by claiming
| people that would have bought on your site anyway
|
| I have seen and been working in companies trying do to the impact
| metrics well, but these are outliers
|
| - websites showing ads are annoying their user and get no benefit
| of it
|
| - stores/brands/people that want to advert pays a bug chunk of
| money for nothing - only the middle men are getting benefits
| malfist wrote:
| Google ads are often like paying someone to stand in front of
| your business and hand out flyers to everyone going inside.
|
| Sure, a lot of your visitors were handed a flyer by google
| before they showed up in your store, but were any of them new
| customers?
| frodo8sam wrote:
| It's worse, you're paying them so your competitor isn't
| standing in front of your store convincing them not to be
| your costumer.
|
| You can either buy the top spot on queries that are looking
| for you or google will sell it to your competitor.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Very true. So you end up on paying for a lot of clicks from
| existing customers who type your product name into Google and
| click on the first thing that comes up, which is increasingly
| an ad.
|
| I used to advertise in Adwords on the name of my products,
| but I no longer bother.
| bombcar wrote:
| The vast majority of people who search _product name_ want
| _product name_ not _knockoff product similar_ - and so let
| the competitors buy the name for ads.
| stetrain wrote:
| And if you don't pay them, the spots in front of your store
| are instead filled by people handing out flyers about your
| competitor down the street.
|
| They don't just take credit for people that were coming to
| your site anyway, they actively steer them away with
| competing ads if you aren't paying enough.
| hdseggbj wrote:
| As long as people keep paying scammers they'll keep
| scamming. I've lost a lot of money and opportunity refusing
| to submit to extortion.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Google ads is bad but wait till you reach the ads on all the
| streaming platforms. Watching the same ad roll for the 20th
| time in the same evening is like the door to door salesman
| that rung your doorbell for the 20th time and kept loudly
| screaming about their product while you're trying to enjoy a
| peaceful meal. If anything, I'm going to actively start
| hating your brand or product.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It's entirely intentional. Companies would rather you
| "hate" their brand than forget their brand.
|
| The reality is that a shockingly high percentage of people
| just _don 't_ get upset about that. Pay attention to anyone
| using a web browser without an ad blocker. They are so deep
| in the learned helplessness hole they don't even complain
| as their web page takes ages to load and reflow while they
| want to read, and they just silently click skip on all
| three youtube ads.
|
| The ads work great on them. Think of how many people bought
| HeadOn.
| bpicolo wrote:
| That would be reminder/retentive advertising, which is also
| an intentional outcome of many ads.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > they don't allow double tracking, so you have to trust their
| numbers
|
| Facebook Ads and SA360 both allow 3rd party impression and
| click tracking. Not to mention the myriad of 3rd party
| analytics tools you can use to track the website.
|
| > if you look at IP from their "clicks", you see often a
| FB/Google datacenter IP range
|
| I've never heard this before and seems hilariously simplistic.
| These megacorps don't have VPNs?
|
| > they did just clever algorithm and heavy profiling to stole
| your organic traffic
|
| Not sure if you had a stroke while writing this, but this makes
| no sense.
|
| As someone who has also been in the industry for 10+ years,
| none of what you said passes the smell test. Maybe after 15
| years you still never understood the industry or technology?
| bestatsiege_01 wrote:
| With respect to:
|
| >> they did just clever algorithm and heavy profiling to
| stole your organic traffic
|
| >Not sure if you had a stroke while writing this, but this
| makes no sense.
|
| I have only ever been a buyer; so my technical understanding
| of the back end implementation is incomplete.
|
| However, I think the point OP is trying to make is that the
| back end of the ad targeting infrastructure ends up
| attributing "spend" to folks who would have otherwise been
| organic traffic and found your site anyway. ie placing your
| ad in effective organic pathways and/or in front of well
| targeted users.
|
| This of course makes sense. A well targeted ad is going to be
| presented to lots of people who would have otherwise been
| organic traffic.
|
| This is just a problem with measuring ROI on ad's in general
| though. I think what has changed is improved attribution of
| digital ad's has confused people. They see 10 clicks, $5
| spend, 1 sale @ $10 and think a 200% ROAS.
|
| In the old days (and still sometimes for non digital) ad
| effectiveness was measured as a lift over baseline. Different
| media had different decay rates.
|
| Depending on your digital property, a similar model may need
| to be applied to your digital campaigns. As I understand
| though, this is harder to do in modern times with digital
| ad's.
| bombcar wrote:
| > Depending on your digital property, a similar model may
| need to be applied to your digital campaigns. As I
| understand though, this is harder to do in modern times
| with digital ad's.
|
| This is _insanely_ important to do now, and the people who
| know how to successfully do it are old and retiring.
|
| But nobody really wants to know the number of advertising
| dollars spent to get customers who were already going to
| spend on your product to ... spend on your product.
| doc_manhat wrote:
| No I'm with him it still makes no sense to me. There's a
| massive assumption that because you fit the profile you'd
| have heard of the service if there wasn't advertising. A
| major part of advertising is to find people who like your
| product. You advertise to let people know about your
| product and keep it in their minds. Lift over baseline is
| relevant yes for ROI, but it doesn't imply the service is
| worthless!
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Cue the "always has been" meme
| mjd wrote:
| "I spoke to a startup founder who raised $2 million in funding
| based on "user growth" metrics that he later discovered were 80%
| bots. He is now trapped, forced to pretend everything is fine
| because admitting the truth could jeopardize his company and his
| relationship with his investors."
|
| If you feel trapped now, just wait until you're in prison!
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I remember reading an article years ago that argued with similar
| examples that the entire website ad market is almost entirely
| artificial/fraud/bots, but that a lot of jobs, a lot of
| companies, and basically the whole industry depends on simply
| pretending this is not true.
| shmeeed wrote:
| I remember that article as well. Initially I could have sworn
| this was a repost, but it's got a current date. There might be
| some Mandela effect at work.
| bombcar wrote:
| We may have all collectively hallucinated it, but I've felt
| the advertising market has been bullshit for quite a while.
| jason_zig wrote:
| I run a survey product for ecommerce stores [1]
|
| A lot of our customers use post purchase surveys and on-site
| surveys to help with this sort of thing. For example a really
| common use-case is an attribution survey which appears after a
| sale is made. The survey will ask something like "how did you
| hear about us?" which helps determine what actually drove the
| sale so they can get some clear insights outside of Google and
| Meta. It's not perfectly reliable but it's an additional data
| point that helps with the mess out there...
|
| [1] https://www.zigpoll.com/
| protonbob wrote:
| > I was not just counting clicks; I was watching behavior.
|
| > This was not the obvious spam that gets filtered out. This was
| sophisticated bot traffic designed to fool standard analytics
| platforms.
|
| > Humans are messy; these bots were clinically precise.
|
| AI slop writing is so tiresome. At least it is somewhat
| noticeable.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| That just looks like 'writer over-educated in grammar above and
| beyond fluency, to the point they know how to use semicolons
| properly'. AI writer detection is just a new manifestation of
| superstition's origins as spurious pattern matching.
| dandellion wrote:
| Well, as a foreign English speaker I have to thank you for
| calling me over-educated in grammar above and beyond fluency
| in a language that is not my own. But aside from that I can
| tell you that those sentences are either written by AI, and
| in the minuscule possibility that they weren't, the author
| must have been intentionally writing to sound like AI for the
| sake of being post-ironic. The second I saw the first
| sentence I knew it was AI and came straight to the comments
| to look for the thread of someone complaining so I could pile
| on.
|
| PS: For what it's worth, I still think the article was
| moderately interesting, even if lazily and poorly written by
| delegating the task to an AI.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Conversion rates have almost always been in the 1% or less range
| for a significant number of advertisers on the web and I've been
| ranting about how absurd this is for decades at this point.
|
| I sincerely wish we could get past this phase of advertising...
| imagine any other product where you're trying to extract money
| from 1% by annoying 99% of your audience. We don't have to
| tolerate this, and many aren't anymore (thanks to ad blockers)
| hermitcrab wrote:
| So if I am running Facebook Ads and I get a load of fraudulent
| traffic, who is instructing these bots to make the fake clicks
| and why?
|
| Facebook? They have the motivation. They are getting paid per
| click. But I don't think they would dare. They would get sued
| into oblivion if they got caught.
|
| A competitor? They could be trying to burn up my marketing
| budget. But it seems it would require a bit more technical
| sophistication than most companies have. And are they really
| going to pay some shady outfit to do it for them? It seems
| unlikely?
|
| An ad agency? It will quickly become obvious that you are getting
| crap return on your spend, so that seems unlikely as well.
|
| Someone else? What is their motivation?
| hahn-kev wrote:
| Maybe it's bots trying to look like real people? So not
| targeting you specifically, but just trying to fake being real
| users?
| hermitcrab wrote:
| This possibly counts for some of it, where you are just the
| collateral damage of somebody trying to disguise their bot as
| a real user. It feels unlikely to be the majority of bots
| though, but I could be wrong.
| guhcampos wrote:
| I'm not sure how many of these there are, but they're very
| significant.
|
| These are bot networks run by big firms just building
| reputation overtime, to be switched on during some huge -
| usually political - campaign.
|
| Suddenly, in some point in the future, all these
| "legitimate" looking "people" start inflating discourse
| against some political figure in some country and
| completely flip the democratic game.
|
| It happened way too many times in the past decade.
| wussboy wrote:
| My money is on Facebook. They believe they can survive a court
| challenge against any competitor because they have almost
| unlimited resources.
| c-linkage wrote:
| Facebook could also pay a subsidiary to fraudulently click on
| the ads.
|
| While this might sound extreme and paranoid, this is exactly
| the kind of thing corporations do to transfer risk and create
| plausible deniability.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| That would be straight up criminal fraud for which people
| could go to prison, isn't it (if they got caught)?
| pixl97 wrote:
| Possibly, but once things get separated by a few layers
| and parts of it occur overseas good luck tracking it all
| down.
| stackskipton wrote:
| With AI and data scrappers, so much traffic is bots scraping
| for various purposes and they were following Facebook Ads and
| crawling the store as well but obviously never made a purchase.
| gs17 wrote:
| I'd presume it's not Facebook themselves, but they simply have
| no incentive to react to the problem as long as people keep
| buying their ads.
| pixl97 wrote:
| All social media seems to suffer from 'bot traffic is traffic
| and all traffic is good' mentality.
|
| If stock regulators weren't so worthless they'd make them
| disclose fraudulent traffic percentages.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > But I don't think they would dare.
|
| I think the history of corporate bad behavior has demonstrated
| that any time you say "Surely, company X wouldn't dare to do
| [some profit-making thing]" you're probably wrong. This applies
| to all companies, not just Facebook. Revenue = R, Cost of the
| activity = A, Probability of being caught = P, Likely fine = F.
| If R > A + P x F, you do the thing.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Hopefully you would be talking about prison time for that
| sort of blatant fraud. But that might naive of me.
| GOD_Over_Djinn wrote:
| I think that prison would be an exceptional case.
| Typically, white collar criminals do not face justice for
| their crimes in the same way as common people.
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| you can choose to pay Facebook per sale / "conversion" instead
| of per clicks, it makes all the incentives more clearly aligned
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Look into methbot.
|
| Typically, it's people who game the algorithm (for ad dollars),
| and use these bots to click on other things (including ads) to
| make it more difficult for FB / Google / etc to detect all the
| traffic going to their pages and content is their own fake
| clicks, trying to train the algorithm to send other people to
| their stuff.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methbot , but I don't
| understand how they were making money.
| detaro wrote:
| Methbot was running the sites showing ads, so they got a
| cut. Doesn't transfer to manipulation on Facebook Ads,
| where I don't think that's a thing in any scenario.
| elgrantomate wrote:
| Nothing new here, nothing surprising.
|
| Wayyyy back in 2000 I ran ad ops for Lycos which included a ton
| of other sites that they had acquired. We did an audit that
| uncovered the fact that 25-75% of traffic/pageviews/visitors/ad
| impressions were due to bots. We did our best at the moment to
| block some more of them, but it was losing game then, as now.
|
| Advertising, especially online advertising, is a largely a waste
| of money. Overall, it's obsolete and while it may generate what
| seems like economic activity, it's a net loss as a use of our
| time and money.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Advertising, especially online advertising, is a largely a
| waste of money. Overall, it's obsolete and while it may
| generate what seems like economic activity, it's a net loss as
| a use of our time and money.
|
| Advertisement has always been largely a waste of money, the
| problem is always trying to figure out what part is a waste and
| what part is effective. Internet advertising promised to be
| more specifically targeted and attributable than previous
| advertising models, but I don't think that really turned out
| well.
|
| As an advertiser, you really have to work hard to know how
| things are working. Ask customers to tell you how they found
| you, but know that customers don't always know and don't always
| share what they know. Adjust advertising campaigns (including
| turning them off) and see how things change, but changes take a
| while to filter though. And you've got to do all the other
| things too --- a lot of new or smaller companies make the
| mistake of spending a lot on advertisements to drive traffic to
| them when they can't service the traffic: coupon campaigns that
| get too many people in, or sending you to a page that's unclear
| or difficult to use so people bail out, etc.
|
| The article claims 50k visitors, 47 sales, $4000 in ad spend;
| it's not really clear if that's overall visitor numbers or just
| from the traffic attributed to advertising. Measuring success
| by visitor numbers or sales counts was never the right way to
| measure success; the numeric measure of success for a business
| should be an accounting measure of net income [1], which is
| only somewhat related to visitor and sales count. If this
| business generates $500 of net income for every sale (excluding
| advertising costs), then $4000 in ad spend to generate 47 sales
| seems reasonable; if they generate $1 of net income for every
| sale, then $4000 in ad spend is highly problematic.
|
| [1] GAAP or adjusted as appropriate to the business
| hackthemack wrote:
| I feel like this was known years ago, but never gained traction.
| Here is a 2022 article in wired about bots.
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/bots-online-advertising/
|
| And before that, in the 2010s, an employee of ebay discovered the
| perverse incentives of online advertising. Freakonomics did a
| podcast on the subject. It is a two parter, but really worth your
| time if you want to get some of the behind the scenes thoughts
| and machinations of the advertising industry.
|
| https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I recently ran $851 of ads on Reddit and the results were crap.
| Mean engaged time per active user of 8 seconds (mean - not
| median!). I makes me wonder if it wasn't mostly bots. If so, who
| was running the bots?
|
| https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/08/11/what-i-learned-spe...
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean it could just be people scraping everything, and as
| reddit has made that more difficult the scrapers may look more
| realistic.
|
| That or dark patters that get people to click on ads in the
| middle of content, where the user instantly backs out once they
| realize.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| >dark patters that get people to click on ads in the middle
| of content, where the user instantly backs out once they
| realize.
|
| I'm sure that is at least part of it. And if they can be
| creative about how they get the page to draw, they can get
| you to click on something unintentionally. The shitty website
| of my local paper is good at this.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| Reddit seems to have one of the biggest bot problems of any
| social media.
| max-privatevoid wrote:
| Perhaps this will eventually lead them to give up on spying on
| users altogether.
| damethos wrote:
| I just run into this:
|
| The dead Internet theory is a conspiracy theory which asserts
| that since around 2016 the Internet has consisted mainly of bot
| activity and automatically generated content manipulated by
| algorithmic curation, as part of a coordinated and intentional
| effort to control the population and minimize organic human
| activity.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
| rudderdev wrote:
| Bots everywhere
| bluGill wrote:
| Ads have been around for a long time. If your great-...-grandpa
| bought a newspaper ad in 1820 he would have been looking to see
| if the ad worked (back then 90+% of people were farmers who
| didn't buy ads, but lets assume you had an ancestor then who was
| a shopkeeper and thus had potential value in ads). He probably
| didn't have have modern statistics, but he would pay attention to
| sales and try to figure out how much value the ad generated. (or
| he liked the guy who ran the newspaper and wanted to buy
| anyway...
|
| If you are running ads you should be running statistics on them.
| You should know that you spent $X on ads, and got $Y on sales.
| This despite how messy the data is (Car manufactures want you to
| buy a new car every 3 years, so most ads are buy in the future
| not today - which makes getting answers hard). What matters isn't
| engagement, clicks, or any other data analysis can give you -
| they are (or trying to be) a proxy for what matters: how did
| advertisements affect sales. There are other ways to get that
| data, those ways have long been known. You shouldn't ignore them
| - if only to verify that that analysis is still working.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Is there a market for software that will use whatever tools are
| available to detect human users from bots and thereby gain some
| "real" metrics?
|
| Because I could probably write that, and I'm currently (mostly)
| on the bench
|
| EDIT: It seems that people actually reject this filtering for
| business-incentive reasons. Well here's what I propose: In order
| to get out of this "debt", we "pay it off" at some rate. So for
| example, every week we subtract an additional 1% of the traffic
| detected as "fake", in order to hopefully get back to some real
| numbers at some point
| 1718627440 wrote:
| What I don't get, why are there not some companies bypassing
| Google and Co. and just pay the website owners directly? That
| would save a bunch of money for both sides and I don't think
| placing some old-school GIFs is that much less annoying for the
| website visitors, so that it would be less effective.
| dbs wrote:
| We had vibe coding. Now we have vibe engineering. Next stop, vibe
| faking.
| satisfice wrote:
| Did I understand you to say that you created a script that
| watches how random visitors move their mice and scroll?
|
| WTF? I'm pretty sure that's either impossible or you have access
| to pretty scary malware.
| elmean wrote:
| google posthog for me
| georgel wrote:
| There are tons of tools that collect stuff like this,
| hotjar.com has been a thing for over a decade.
| kqr wrote:
| This is what frustrated me when I worked in e-commerce. They are
| blessed with the highest-quality signal ever - the purchase - but
| it's generated very rarely for anyone who is not Alibaba or
| Amazon.
| SirMaster wrote:
| Am I the only one who thinks that websites shouldn't even be able
| to see a users mouse movement or scrolling?
| shmeeed wrote:
| Me too, and even though I had heard about it before, I was
| thankful for the sobering reminder.
| dgfl wrote:
| It's interesting that this matches _exactly_ the ChatGPT writing
| style. There's clearly some human data and work behind, but the
| entire article has the usual "it's not just X, it's ...", bold
| emphasis on specific words, bullet points, and probably more that
| I'm just subconsciously picking up.
|
| Nothing wrong with using ChatGPT for help of course, I just found
| it interesting and kind of ironic given the contents of the
| article. It would be even more interesting if this was the actual
| writing style of the author, since this must be what ChatGPT was
| fine tuned to adhere to. Is it the predominant style of
| communication in adtech?
| doc_manhat wrote:
| Yes I saw the AIisms and immediately went to the comments lol.
| It's interesting I still don't think that it's worth reading
| stuff that seems so obviously AI generated! If you can't be
| bothered to write or at least edit it I guess I just by default
| end up trusting the content less.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Lost me at "It all started with a simple, devastating problem."
|
| Tried to keep going, but "a strange, unsettling feeling crept
| in," yes indeed.
|
| Also please note OP is marketting copy for an analytics product
| that presumably says it will filter out bot traffic better?
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| "Her traitor tears betraying her"
| Animats wrote:
| The picture looks AI-generated, too, or at least irrelevant
| clip art.
| jmuguy wrote:
| Really ironic given the content of this post. Glad that humans
| are already getting pretty good at clocking this sort of BS
| quickly, makes it easy to ignore. Maybe a new idiom for our
| time. Startups want to fail quickly, I want to detect AI
| generated content quickly so I can move on.
| getnormality wrote:
| The really ironic thing is that this article demonstrates the
| correct, purposeful human usage of these stock phrases and is
| getting skewered for it because it superficially sounds like
| AI. It's not exemplifying what it's criticizing, it's
| exemplifying the exact reverse of what it's criticizing.
|
| "It's not X, it's Y" is for when you know your reader will
| think X, and you want them to understand the difference between
| the X they are expecting and the Y that is actually the case.
|
| Here are the two "not just" passages in the article:
|
| > Driven by this discrepancy, I built a simple tracking script.
| It was not a sophisticated piece of software, just a tool
| designed to observe how "users" actually interacted with the
| website. I was not just counting clicks; I was watching
| behavior.
|
| > The bots operating today are disturbingly good. They are not
| just hitting your site and leaving; they are programmed to
| mimic engagement, making your marketing ROI calculations
| dangerously inaccurate. I began to categorize them.
|
| Both of these passages are using the "not just X, but Y" trope
| in a purposeful, meaningful way, anticipating what a typical
| audience member might assume and signaling for them to adjust
| their expectation. Not just trying to maximize the usage of the
| trope with random non-sequitur values of X and Y, as GPT does.
|
| (Oh dear, I just said it too.)
|
| It would be interesting to assemble a corpus of meaningful
| human text with superficial use of AI tropes, put it side-by-
| side with true AI slop, and see who can tell the difference. I
| suspect that, in the coming years, this will be a test posed in
| higher education and job interviews.
| dgfl wrote:
| I mostly disagree.
|
| > I was not just counting clicks; I was watching behavior.
|
| This is completely superfluous. The rest of the paragraph is
| fine, but the only real ChatGPTism is this one.
|
| > They are not just hitting your site and leaving; they are
| programmed to mimic engagement
|
| In this case it's a valid sentence. What makes it sound
| overly AI are the semicolon and the timing, which is exactly
| the usual "it's not just {1-5 words}; it's {1-5 words}".
|
| Also, perhaps I'm not a typical audience member (I'm not),
| but I was not assuming any of that. I would try to explain
| how I parse this kind of language, but the gist is that a 10
| sentence word with unambiguous meaning doesn't really leave
| space for interpretation. Your attempt to "anticipate what
| the audience is thinking" is just a writing style, nothing
| deep about it.
|
| My point mostly being that, as I mentioned in the parent,
| this is clearly a text written in the ChatGPT style, with
| simple yet over-expressive language. I personally heavily
| dislike the style, but I'm a non native speaker used to
| either scientific or fiction prose. I don't encounter it too
| often, and to me it sounds like a parody of Silicon Valley
| vernacular. Scam alerts immediately start firing in my brain.
| There's no "good way" of doing it nowadays.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| Does author suggesting that META or Google are building these
| bots to fake traffic? They are the one's making money from it.
|
| I wouldn't understand what would be motivation of anyone else to
| create these bots to click on ad's on facebook. It must be the
| advertising's company.
| crystaln wrote:
| It's definitely better to know what traffic is real for many
| reasons, however won't clicks just lower the value of a click and
| conversion numbers, but leave overall conversion the same?
|
| If conversion rate drops 90%, the value of a click should also
| drop 90% as companies adjust the bids for ads.
|
| I'm sure this isn't always true in practice and it takes time for
| bids to adjust. I'm just wondering how much impact this actually
| has.
|
| And on the other side, if ad companies were better at filtering
| bots, their clicks become more valuable and companies should be
| willing to pay more.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Please note the site this appears on, `joindatacops.com` is
| selling an analytics product? So this is presumably marketing
| copy about how their product can do better at filtering bots?
|
| "First-party Web Analytics That Powers CRM: Stop losing leads to
| blockers, bots, and fake clicks. DataCops gives your CRM the real
| customer journey."
| SigmundA wrote:
| I have noticed bots posting a various forums, not sure what the
| angle is as they aren't usually trying to sell anything, just
| posting AI slop. I am going too assume it's to build up some sort
| of legitimate looking profile for future use, it's a scourge
| ruining other wise valuable sources of information.
|
| Here is recent example:
|
| https://diysolarforum.com/threads/ai-bots-are-here-on-diy-so...
| Animats wrote:
| If your site sells your own product, why does it have third-party
| ads? They just distract from your own product. Yet apparently
| they attract click bots.
|
| Is he paying for inbound traffic? To whom? Clearly they're not
| delivering.
| tiahura wrote:
| This is news? The whole idea of allowing low-trust countries
| access to the internet makes little sense.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| The lies contained in advertising, now fueled by the lies about
| the viewership of advertising, prop up much of the modern
| economy.
|
| Advertising: it's lies all the way down.
| jlarocco wrote:
| I'm not a big fan of AI, but if it kills off online advertising
| and marketting, maybe there's a silver lining...
| dnw wrote:
| The other side of this is apparently also true: LLMs Reproduce
| Human Purchase Intent via Semantic Similarity Elicitation of
| Likert Ratings - https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08338
| LunaSea wrote:
| Since we're talking about bot detection, any library or service
| recommendations?
|
| I know of fingerprint.js which is semi open source but I have
| never tried them out. Any feedback?
| mustaphah wrote:
| Good read, but worth keeping in mind the conflict of interest
| here - the author's company sells bot-detection tools.
|
| The overall point stands, yet the specific "73% fake traffic"
| figure should be taken with caution until independent data backs
| it up.
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